Tilda Swinton Transforms MoMa Into A Narcoleptic Peep Show

The Oscar-winning actress Tilda Swinton has taken on a new role – as a performance artist, sleeping in a glass box for up to eight hours a day at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Swinton took visitors to the gallery by surprise on Saturday with an unscheduled appearance in an art installation titled The Maybe. She will now replicate the one-person piece six more times on different occasions in several locations around MoMa before the end of the year.

In 1995, with the producer Joanna Scanlan, Swinton helped develop the performance/installation at the Serpentine Gallery in London, where she was on public display for a week, asleep or apparently so, in a glass case, as a piece of live performance art. The work of art has sometimes been wrongly credited to Turner Prize nominee Cornelia Parker, whom Swinton invited to collaborate for the installation in London.

Maybe, was performed in 1996 at the Museo Barracco in Rome and again this year in New York. Swinton also appeared in the music video for Orbital’s “The Box”, collaborated with the fashion designers Viktor & Rolf and became the focus of their ‘One Woman Show’ 2003, in which they made all the models look like clones of Swinton.

In February this year, she played the part of David Bowie’s wife in the promotional video for his song, The Stars (Are Out Tonight), directed by Floria Sigismondi. Swinton lives with her partner Sandro Kopp, a painter of German/New Zealand origin. Photo: Courtesy Twitter

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